Ritual in Tippett's King Priam Suzanne Robinson
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Ritual in Tippett's King Priam Suzanne Robinson In the making and in the understanding of a human understanding, the eternal, the numinous work of art, and the more easily ifit isfull of or the transcendent. Each of these artists patterm and symbols and music, we are possessed some sense of such aspirations and lured to the threshold of sleep, and it may be their attraction to ritual was the symptom rather far beyond it, without knowing that we have ever set ourfeet upon the steps of horn or of than the cause of a fundamental belief. Although ivory. Eliot and Auden were affiliated with the Church (W.B. Yeats ,1900).l of England, Stravinsky with Russian Orthodoxy and Tippett with none, they adhered to some As a young composer, Tippett (1905 - ) form of belief in order to counter a world of schooled himself not only in the techniques of frightening scientific rationalism. composition but in the achievements of his In 'A Note on Poetry and Belief' (1927), Eliot contemporaries in the fields of poetry and of chided those who separated the two and in drama. Like them he became intrigued by the response to criticism of The Waste Land, assured myths and rituals of the ancient world. 'All art', his readers that 'doubt and uncertainty are merely T.S. Eliot claimed in 1923, 'emulates the a variety of belief .9 Yet 'the era of Joyce', he condition of ritual, this is what it comes from and claimed in 1935, 'is of those who have never to what is must always return for nourishment'.2 heard the Christian Faith spoken of as anything W.B. Yeats wanted to create 'a play that will be but an anachronism'.lO more'a ritual than a play'3 and W.H. Auden described the poem as a rite in itself: 'the true Eliot could well have been referring to Tippett, poem in the French sense of lapobiepure would whom he had met in that year. Tippett had by be, I suppose, a celebration of the numinous in then found his spiritual model, not in organised itself in abstraction from all cases and devoid of religion, whether eastern or western, but in the writings of Jung. His 'conversion' in the early any referen~e'.~Latin was for Stravinsky the quintessential language of ritual and thirties was the equivalent of Eliot's for Tippett convention, appropriate for 'subjects touching has never apparently altered his stance. When he on the sublirne'.5 Shaw saw the role of the artist came, in the 1970s, to edit a 1945 talk for Moving as an 'iconographer of the religion of my time'.6 into'~~wrius,he found buried in the earlier In Shaw's Back to Methuselah, one of Tippett's words, 'hints of more complex ideas'.ll The sources for The Midsummer Marriage (1955), the stated attempt of transfiguring 'the everyday by She-Ancient claimed that 'Art is the magic mirror a touch of the everlasting', he discovered,carried ,you make to reflect your invisible dreams in the suggestion of acreedin formulation. In 1956, visible pictures. You use a glass mirror to see his essay, 'What I believe', reiterated the old dichotomy between amoral scientificrationalism your face: you use works of art to see your soul'.7 Following such examples, Tippett declared art to and the world of the imagination but applied Science, Tippett be that iconof the numinous which can transform Jungian ideas to the latter. claimed, is repressing our longing for a more the everyday. spiritually active life. In this essay also Tippett Such an iconography must reflect a live religion was most critical of Eliot's pompous 'us and and Eliot was adamant on this point: them' attitude. He claimed that he, like Eliot, had Of what value is it to 'revive' the Sword had (spiritual) experiences, but his were of a kind Dance except as a Saturday afternoon which Eliot would reject as theologicallyfalse. l2 alternative to tennisand badminton for active Tippett himself sought a more universal religion young men in garden suburbs? For you cannot revive a ritual without reviving a or philosophy than Christianity, which he saw as faith. You can continue a ritual after the irretrievably tied to western puritanism. As an faith is dead ...but you cannot revive it.8 artist he rejected traditional faiths but believed While myth could express collective 'that the faculty the artist may sometimes have to experience, the symbolism of ritual and liturgy create images through which these mysterious expressed somethingfurther: aspirations beyond depths of our being speak to us is a true - - fundamental. I believe it is part of what we mean heightened drama, whether literally or virtually by having knowledge of ~od'.l3 In the 1978 music, was formed from the Greek paradigm. postscript to the same essay, the argument was Yeats's three instruments symbolised rhythm, further refined. He believed that 'spiritual melody and accompaniment, in order of treasure' could be legitimately separated from significance. Though the actual nature of this the trappings of dogma and liturgy. music was never defined, Yeats's simple 'music of pipe and drum' in its very vagueness In his essay, 'Drum, Flute and Zither' (1953), acknowledged the intensity of music and its Tippett set out his interpretation of the history of essential element,rhythm. Abstract notions which ritual drama and music. The innovation of the cannot be verbalised, especially religious ones, Greeks, he suggested, was 'the raising of stage could yet be expressedin music because music is verse beyond incantatory speech into recitative untranslatable. and song'. l4 Racine, conscious of the heritage of Tippett concluded his panorama of spiritual the Greeks, knew that 'to remove the divine, affirmations in drama with a discussion of Eliot's transcendent element from the drama, whether plays. Tippett was fascinated by Eliot's comments because one holds the Greekreligious experience in 'Poetry and Drama' (1951), where he saw to be false or because one is enlightened and Eliot as sceptical, is to move oneself toward a world of someone we imagine as wholly within the spiritual impoverishment'.l5 Tippett then Christian experience, but in The Family distinguished between Racine's works of the Reunion he uses a Greek myth, as Racine poetry of transcendence and Goethe's reduction and Goethe do, though not like them on a stage set in a scene of ancient Greece; for to mere 'goodness'. In Goethe's form, 'there is The Family Reunion is set in a scene of the no tragic element; no "life enflamed by death"; present day. As if to emphasise a further no "soft, feathery shape" beyond death; no difference from Racine and Goethe, Eliot music of pipe and drum'. Nor did Shaw receive does not dismiss as they did, if for different any approbation for his revival of religion on a reasons, the Greekreligious experience from scientific basis in Back to Methuselah. The result, his stage. l7 according to Tippett, was sentimental rather than Eliot himself described holding up the action numinous, the artist an historian rather than with intimations ofreligious experience as putting iconographer. Yet in Yeats's drama, Tippett up with a 'poetic fantasia'.lg Tippett, however, discovered an 'ineffable perfume', the quality believed this a great gain for the theatre and which Goethe did not display. At the moment of found opportunity toinform~liotof his opinion.19 the murder of Cuchulain in The Death of It was Tippett's view that 'by just such operatic Cuchulain, Yeats called for the music of pipe and tricks as lyrical suspensions of the action to drum and this 'theatrically poetic situation', for savour a situation, the play can be given new Tippett, expressed 'the otherwise inexpressible'. dimensions' and implicitly,'moments of the unity Particularly in Yeats's PlaysforDancers, both of poetry and belief. Tippett's most direct Tippett andEliot found a contemporary precedent. acknowledgement of Eliot lies at the end of this Like them, Yeats believed that drama should essay where he praises Eliot's exemplification of renew a faith and to do so it should be distanced spiritual experience in art. and strange. Invoking the Japanese Noh drama, The Greek religious experience adapted by Yeats developed an increasingly stylised stage, Eliot was a ritualistic one. These spiritual of poetic chant, dance and negligible scenery to aspirations, if not religious affiliations, were render a spiritual and mythical world. Eliot had revived (or, in Eliot's term, revivified) by the seen Yeats's At the Hawk's Well at its first discoveries of the ritual origins of primitive performance and was entranced by the appearance myth. Jane Harrison, F.M. Cornford and their of the hawk. In 1924 he had been so taken with associates revealed the transcendent images of Yeats's model that he informed Arnold Bennett Greek life and thea~.~OPrimitive rituals, she that he wanted to give up poetry and write a discovered, dealt with symbols of birth, death drama of modern life in rhythmic prose and and the after life. Man could not outwit fate or 'perhaps with certain things in it accentuated by evade destiny: birth and death were immutable drum-beats'. l6 The principle of music as experiences. Tippett noted the occurrence of these themes in The Rite of Spring which he Having read Eliot's seminal essay 'Poetry described as 'a drama of renewal. But it is a and Drama' and written essays and an opera of renewal only at the cost of sacrificing a virgin his own, in 1958 Tippett came to compile King girl. Life is only renewed by death. Yet life is Priam and the impact of his discoveries in religion renewed - if only by an ecstatic religious rite'.21 and ritual is evident in that work.